During my one-year fellowship/assistantship with the Leo Marchutz School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence, France, I painted regularly from life, often outside, between seminars and casual discussions on the nature of art. In the tradition of Cezanne, I treated painting as a mode of inquiry into the conditions of my vision and the medium itself. These works, each painted in one session, represent not striving after finished products so much as engagements in a practice: of simultaneously looking out into the world and into onesself, toward a unified expression and the discovery of new forms.